1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the telephony art and in particular it is concerned with the telephone broadcasting of alarm, public utility, advertising, voice messages or the like, into defined geographical areas.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In several circumstances a need exists for broadcasting a special message into a determined geographical area. The message could concern the announcement of impending natural calamities (floods, landslides, eruptions, hurricanes, etc. . . . ), the communication of a near interruption in the provision of services (power, water, gas, etc. . . . ) or of serious problems connected therewith (e.g. drinking water pollution), the danger of war attacks, advertising information, traffic jams/accidents information or the like.
So far, all these messages have been sent via xe2x80x9cconventionalxe2x80x9d methods like by means of sirens, loudspeakers mounted on vehicles driving in the target areas, or via mass-media (newspapers, radio, TV). The use of such conventional methods has serious drawbacks.
In particular, sirens provide only generic alarm indications (which are often hard to interpret, especially in circumstances of panic), they need to be previously installed at several definite locations and lastly they might be not heard by people living far away from the installation points. As far as the loudspeakers mounted on vehicles are concerned, the spread of the message requires a lot of time and people for driving the vehicles (in case of calamity often it is impossible to move around or it might be difficult to drive along streets crowded by panic-stricken people) and the message might not be heard by people living in the suburbs, in isolated houses or in minor streets. Through mass media, people are reached by the message only in a much delayed way and, above all, media do not reach most of the people which do not access that particular communication means in a certain period of time. At any rate, none of the above methods is able to establish if, how many, and which people have become aware of the message.
In an attempt to overcome the above drawbacks, the Canadian patent application n. 2.153.096 disclosed a method of announcing or alerting people to an emergency or other events by means of an audible message transmitted to household telephones by means of public switched telephone networks. The method of the Canadian patent application is based on the use of the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system which requires equipment outside the public telephone exchange. Such a system is improper for large-scale use in spreading urgent messages since it necessarily requires a lot of additional apparatuses in addition to those already installed; moreover, connections between the outside apparatuses and the public telephone exchanges act as a xe2x80x9cbottle neckxe2x80x9d whereby the calls are necessarily serialized, thus bringing the message broadcasting time up to levels which are considered unacceptable for urgent messages such as e.g. those concerned with impending calamities. A further serious drawback of such a system is that it can not be used for cellular telephones thus excluding a lot of people potentially interested in receiving the message.
In view of the prior art drawbacks mentioned above, the main object of the present invention is to provide a method for telephone broadcasting messages into defined geographical areas swhich is effective, speedy and that allows the message to be sent to a lot of people provided with a fixed or cellular telephone.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a method that allows the verification as regards the messages actually received by the receivers.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a method which substantially does not require any additional equipment for the implementation thereof but substantially utilizes the equipment already available at the existing telephone exchanges.
These and further objects are achieved by the a method for telephone broadcasting warnings, information or the like into a target defined geographical area through a telephone system comprising one or more public telephone exchanges and a plurality of fixed subsets with a corresponding directory number associated therewith, wherein the method comprises the steps of: dividing the target area into geographical zones; associating with the directory number of each fixed telephone subset an information indicating a geographical zone inside which the fixed telephone subset is installed; providing each public telephone exchange with the geographical zone information related to the directory numbers controlled thereby; providing the telephone exchanges with the list of geographical zones which such message is to be sent to; and causing the telephone exchanges to automatically make a call to all the directory numbers associated with the target geographical zones. The method may also include the step of providing the telephone exchange with the text of a registered message, and the step of calling comprises the step of broadcasting the requested recorded message to the users.
Further advantageous characteristics of the invention will be apparent from the description and claims below.
The basic idea is to automatically telephone to all the target people and provide them with a recorded announcement containing the message to be broadcasted. The proposed solution proves to be very flexible and allows several possibilities that can be chosen in accordance with the type of message to be broadcasted, the size of the area into which to spread the message, the required precision, the number of people to be alerted, the time that can be devoted to the spreading of the message, and so on.
The invention will certainly become clear after reading the following detailed description, given by way of a mere non limiting example, with reference to the annexed figures.